Kasha Jacqueline Nabagesera has bravely appeared on Ugandan national TV The brave founder of Uganda’s lgbt rights organisation is to receive the world’s major human rights award. Kasha Jacqueline Nabagesera will be given the Martin Ennals Award for Human Rights Defenders (MEA) at a ceremony in Geneva later in the year. Nabagesera is the founder and Executive Director of Freedom and Roam Uganda. She has courageously appeared on national television and radio stations in Uganda, where gay acts remain illegal. In 2007 she was harassed at the World Social Forum in Nairobi, and on many occasions afterwards she was heckled, threatened and even attacked by people for appearing in the media. Since then she has been shifting from house to house, afraid to stay long in the same place. In January her colleague David Kato was murdered following the publication of a “gay list” by the Ugandan tabloid Rolling Stone calling for their hanging; where her name also appears. The Chairman of the Jury of the MEA, Hans Thoolen, describes the laureate as “an exceptional woman of a rare courage, fighting under death threat for human dignity and the rights of homosexuals and marginalised people in Africa”. Known as the ‘Nobel Prize for Human Rights’, MEA is named after Amnesty International’s first-secretary general who died in 1991. It is given out by a jury composed of Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Human Rights First, International Federation for Human Rights, World Organisation Against Torture, Front Line, International Commission of Jurists, German Diakonie, International Service for Human Rights and HURIDOCS. With this award the Jury says it wants to underline its position against the discrimination of people based on gender or sexual orientation.
Credit: GayNZ.com Daily News staff
First published: Wednesday, 4th May 2011 - 12:09pm